


Star Trek: Shield 1x04 “Voices”

by raiining



Series: Star Trek: SHIELD [4]
Category: Carry On - Rainbow Rowell, Stargate Atlantis, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Dresden Files - Jim Butcher
Genre: Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex (Harry Dresden), Alternate Universe - Star Trek Fusion, Ceiling Vent Clint Barton, F/F, Girl!Harry Dresden, M/M, medically inaccurate schizophrenia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-10
Updated: 2016-08-10
Packaged: 2018-08-07 21:53:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 19,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7731133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raiining/pseuds/raiining
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>With a successful mission under their belt, the crew of the <i>U.S.S. Shield</i> now have a way to find the people who orchestrated the death of their former captain.  Working together, they come up with a plan to lure the guilty party into the open, planning to pounce on them the moment they are revealed.</p>
<p>But all is not what it seems.  Instead of being caught helpless in their scheme, the guilty party has another option, and when a trap is sprung, it will be sprung on the <i>Shield...</i>  </p>
<p> </p>
<p>Episode Four in the Clint/Coulson centric, multifandom Star Trek Fusion AU!</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter One

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you again to the wonderful Ralkana and OrderlyChaos for their beta'ing help, and to Desert_neon for her cheerleading! All three of you helped to make this story better!
> 
> Please note: Clint Barton/Phil Coulson, John Sheppard/Rodney McKay, and Simon Snow/Baz are the primary pairings in this episode, with some minor Natasha Romanova/Danielle Cage

Phil Coulson was kissing him. He was _kissing Phil Coulson._

Clint sucked in a surprised breath. Phil’s lips were soft and dry, but firm against his own. He belatedly tried to press back, but the lips — and Phil — were already pulling back. Clint tried to chase them. “No,” he said. “Wait!”

Phil put up a hand. It wavered slightly — he was clearly exhausted — but his gaze held firm. “You,” he said, his blue eyes bright, “drive me _crazy._ ” 

Clint blinked.

Phil nodded sharply, as if he’d explained everything, and turned. He stepped back into his quarters and the door slid shut behind him.

Clint stared at the pale beige door. He touched his lips. What? 

He found himself turning away, feet stumbling. Without quite realizing what it was doing, his hand reached up and tapped his communicator. “Hey, Nat?” 

Belatedly, he remembered that he wasn’t supposed to be on a first-name basis with the new captain of the _U.S.S. Shield_. “I mean…”

His combadge chimed. “What is it, Barton?” Natasha answered. The connection was perfect and her voice was clear, but Clint couldn’t tell whether she was alone or not. She didn’t sound overly upset with him, at least. 

“I just,” Clint found himself saying. He realized he was walking away from Phil’s quarters and stopped to look back. “Have we run into anything unusual in the past five minutes? Maybe crossed into an alternate dimension or something?”

Natasha sounded amused. “Not that I’m aware of. Why?”

Clint stared at Phil’s door. “No reason.”

“Uh huh,” Nat said dryly. “What happened?”

“I’m — ” Clint stopped. He touched his lips again. “I’m not actually sure.”

Natasha sighed. _Now_ she sounded upset with him. “Get some sleep, Barton.” 

“Yes, Mom.”

She huffed a laugh, and then his combadge chimed off.

Clint licked his lips. Natasha gave good advice, but he wasn’t actually tired — he’d slept on the transport back to the _Shield._ Phil hadn’t. He’d been acting strange ever since the end of the mission, hovering while they’d been on the Orion ship, almost fussing once they’d gotten to the shuttle, but then taking off the moment they had arrived back on the _Shield._ Clint had skipped his post-mission check in Medical and Phil hadn’t even yelled at him. Clint had spent an hour pacing in his quarters before deciding that he’d just find Phil and ask him what he’d done wrong.

He shouldn’t have, of course. He should have just let it go. People got tired of him, he knew that. Only Natasha had ever stuck around. Phil had chased Clint for two years though, and Clint had hoped, he’d hoped maybe… 

He didn’t even know what.

He hadn’t been expecting that kiss, though. Phil had just lurched forward and kissed him, catching Clint by surprise, his fingers tight and sure on either side of Clint’s head.

Something deep inside of Clint tightened at the memory, arousal blooming. He shut it down hard. It couldn’t have meant… It couldn’t have meant what Clint wanted it to mean.

Phil had said Clint drove him crazy, right? That made more sense than Phil having — than Phil having _feelings_ for him. Phil was _Phil._ He was quick and hot and smart, too smart to get involved with someone like Clint.

Knowing that didn’t stop Clint from dreaming, though. Phil had been incredible from the start, the young Intelligence officer sent to track Clint down and drag him in, all bright blue eyes and righteous indignation. Clint hadn’t been able to resist that siren call. He’d never thought it’d _get_ him anywhere. Phil was everything Clint could aim for and never reach — educated, intelligent, passionate, and _good._ All the things Clint could never be.

He’d thought, maybe, for a little while, that Phil had at least been flirting back, but at some point Clint knew he’d pushed too far. On Andure XIII, maybe, or possibly Regor Eight. Either way, the cat-and-mouse game they’d been playing had changed in tone over the years. By the time Phil had caught up to him in the Janaran Jungle, Clint had thought Phil might really just shoot him then and there. 

Of course, Clint hadn’t helped the situation by escaping from Betazed and leading Phil on a space-chase through the Rixx asteroid field. Clint had managed to get away long enough to double back to Starbase G-6, but he’d learned later that Phil’s shuttle had been hit. Phil had managed to limp to Starbase G-6 before his supplies had run out, but then, instead of clapping Clint in irons and marching him off to Starfleet Command like Clint would have expected, Phil had turned around and _saved his life_ when the Nausicaans attacked. 

Clint shook his head. He could have walked away in the confusion after Captain Block had been killed. The previous captain of the _U.S.S. Shield_ had been vapourized right in front of them and everything had been chaotic. No one would have noticed Clint was gone, but Clint had looked over and seen Phil talking to Security Chief Danielle Cage. He was nodding in all the right places, trying not to look like he minded getted grilled on his part in the disaster, and Clint had known right then and there that he couldn’t leave.

He’d never thought he’d become a member of the crew, but Admiral Fury had asked him to remain on board and help with the investigation. Fury had thought Clint’s underworld connections might come in useful as Starfleet tried to piece together the truth behind Captain Block’s death. _Someone_ had paid Clint to steal the Sacred Chalice of Rixx, and someone had paid the Nausicaans to intercept Clint at Starbase G-6. Starfleet thought the two were the same person, and they knew from the faked message to one of Clint’s oldest contacts that it had been someone with access to Phil’s Intelligence files.

Clint had been trying to figure out who that someone was. A Ferengi Dealmaker named Quorn had known their transmission code, and had heard that they’d still been interested in acquiring ancient artifacts. A jevonite dagger from the First Hebitian Civilization on Cardassia Prime had caught their attention. Clint, Phil, and Harry Dresden, the _U.S.S. Shield_ ’s chief engineer, had gone to Lissepia to steal it, hoping to trade the dagger for information on the person who’d led to the death of Captain Block.

The mission hadn’t exactly gone smoothly, though, and Clint had gotten a little banged up. Phil had seemed to take every scratch personally. Clint wasn’t sure why. He still didn’t know why Phil had saved his life on Starbase G-6 to begin with, except that Phil was a decent sort of person and would probably have helped anyone he’d found about to get stabbed by a Nausicaan. Flying back on the shuttle, Clint had once again hoped that Phil’s fussing had been more about _Clint,_ but then Phil had taken off as soon as they’d gotten back to the _Shield._

When Clint had gone to find him, Phil had kissed him. Clint shook his head, still confused by the entire situation, and turned a corner without looking where he was going. Someone was standing in the corridor, one foot inside a door as if they’d been stepping out to look around, and Clint walked right into their back. “Oof!” 

It was Baz. The doctor turned, his look of irritation shifting the moment his gaze focused on Clint. “You!” 

Clint blinked and looked around. Somehow his dazed wandering had taken him from Phil’s quarters to the hallway outside of Medical. While he was distracted, Doctor Pitch lurched forward and clamped one hand on Clint’s shoulder. Clint was too surprised to break the hold. 

“You’ll do,” Baz said, and dragged Clint into Medical. 

“I -- ? What? Hey!” Clint protested.

“Hush!” Baz snapped. “You were shot at recently, weren’t you? Buried in rubble? Four cracked vertebrae, a damaged spinal cord, a minor skull fracture, and six broken ribs?”

“I, uh, yeah,” Clint admitted, scratching his head. The scab still itched. “But the Orions patched me up.”

“Ba. Aliens,” Baz dismissed. “What do they know about putting humans back together? Sit down and shut up, I’m going to scan you.”

Clint found himself being all but thrown onto the exam table. “Ouch,” he said when he landed. “Watch the bruises, Doc.”

Baz glared. “If you hadn’t skipped your post-mission check, you wouldn’t have any.”

Clint shrugged. He didn’t want to admit he’d been trying to get a rise out of Phil. “I felt fine.”

Baz snorted. “Oh, well, if you _felt_ fine. I’m glad you _felt_ fine.” A muscle in his jaw ticked. “You all think you're bloody invincible, don’t you?”

Clint gave him a look. “I’m pretty sure I know I’m not.” He nodded to the corridor. “So who are you really mad at?”

“What?” Baz snapped. He grabbed his scanner.

Clint rolled his eyes. “In the hallway — you weren’t looking for me, you were watching for someone else. Who was it?”

Baz’s grey-eyed gaze went flinty. He ran the scanner over Clint.

Clint eyed him. Only one person could make Baz look that constipated. “Simon skipped out on his follow-up again, didn’t he?” 

“ _Lieutenant_ Snow,” Baz growled, “assures me he that feels _perfectly fine._ ” He glared at Clint. “Apparently you’re all certified medical experts now.”

Clint pursed his lips to hide a smile. “Are you feeling useless, Doc?”

“ _Yes,_ ” Baz snapped. “Because if the two of you decide to run around and get shot at, the least you can do is let me patch you up afterwards!” He poked Clint hard in the chest. “You were neurologically compromised! Simon was nearly dead! I had my hands wrist-deep in his chest cavity!” Baz whirled around and all but threw the scanner into a bin across the room. “You bloody idiots!”

Clint winced. “Sorry.”

Baz seethed. “I asked him to report to me once, and he refused; I threatened to put off his return-to-duty date, and he agreed to _one_ scan, and then all but ran away the moment my back was turned.” Baz stomped to the overhead screen and stabbed at the controls. “I made him _promise_ to come back here today and of course it’s the end of my shift and he’s.” Stab. “Not.” Stab. “ _Here._ ”

Clint thought back to Phil’s hands on the sides of his face and smiled. “Maybe you should kiss him.”

Baz whirled around. “What?!”

Clint shrugged. “He’d be so surprised, he’d stand still for once.”

Baz fish-mouthed for a moment, jaw hanging open. He was just drawing breath for some sort of — likely blistering — reply, when the door to Medical slid open. Baz and Clint both turned.

It wasn’t Simon. Rodney McKay slunk into the room. 

“What do _you_ want?” Baz accused.

McKay slid to a stop, his eyes wide, apparently thrown by the unexpected attention. “I, uh,” he said, and then pointed to a bin of hyposprays. “I was just — ”

“Absolutely not!” Baz snapped. “I told you, Rodney, if I caught you stealing my supplies _one more time..._ ”

McKay raised his hands into the air even as he ducked his shoulders. “I only — ”

“No!” Baz thundered. “If you can’t sleep, then you come to me and I will give you an actual, _medically sound_ remedy. I will not have you spitting venom about voodoo and witchcraft and then slinking away with medical supplies because you think two Ph.D’s in physics makes you a physician!”

McKay shook his head, his eyes haunted. “I don’t want to sleep.”

Baz stopped and took a deep breath. He seemed to draw it up from the very soles of his shoes. “Rodney...”

“It’s fine,” McKay backpedaled — literally; he was stepping back into the corridor. “I should sleep, anyway, Radek keeps telling me so, I was just — ” He screwed up his face, eyes squeezing shut.

“Just what, Rodney?” Baz asked tiredly.

McKay seemed to come to some sort of decision. His shoulders fell, and he shook his head. “Nothing. I was just nothing.”

Baz eyed him warily. “Are you sure?”

McKay nodded. “I’m sure, really. I’m — ” He pointed somewhere behind him. “I’m going to go to bed now.”

“Good,” Baz said. His voice gained a little warmth, becoming kinder. “Let me know if you can’t sleep, okay?”

“I will,” McKay said, nodding again. “Promise.” He stepped fully back into the corridor and the door slid shut.

Clint blinked and turned back to Baz. “What was that all about?”

“Nothing,” Baz said. He suddenly looked exhausted, reaching up to rub one knuckle into his eye. “Come on, let’s finish this exam so we can all get some sleep. Snow obviously isn’t coming, and you’re almost done.”

Clint opened his mouth to protest that he hadn’t had an appointment in the first place, but choosing silence over valour, shut it without saying anything. He could sit here for another few minutes and let Baz fuss over him. The man looked like he needed it.

Besides, it gave him time to debate what he was going to do about Phil. Maybe Phil really _had_ meant the kiss the way Clint wanted him to. Maybe this time Clint could have something he wanted, and keep it.

The wall lit up as Baz ran the scanner over Clint’s chest and abdomen. Clint looked over to see his bloody history on full display, every scar highlighted — stark proof of his stupidity, poor choices, and idiot luck. There was the time his brother had broken his shoulder. There was the time Duquesne had stabbed him in the back. 

Clint shook his head, looking away from the display. It was ridiculous to hope. There was no way Phil would ever want anything to do with a moron like him. 

 

*

 

“You’re being an idiot,” Radek accused, following Rodney down the corridor.

“Don’t accuse me of intellectual disparity; I’m the most intelligent man you know,” Rodney defended, although he had to admit that his heart wasn’t in it.

Radek could sense that, of course. He was only a figment of Rodney’s imagination, after all. “You might know physics, but Doctor Pitch is right — you’re terrible at the social sciences, Rodney.”

Rodney huffed. “At least you agree with me that medicine isn’t a real science.”

“‘Social’ isn’t another word for fictional, you know.”

“Of course it is.”

They both paused as their meandering took them back to Rodney’s quarters — they knew Rodney’s computer sat there, waiting, the same program they’d been running when they’d left the room still active. Rodney pursed his lips together. “It’s ridiculous. Obviously, I’ve lost more of my mind than I’d thought.”

Radek shook his head. “ _Ne,_ ” he said. “It is some kind of a trick, Rodney. _I_ did not send that message.”

“It was signed ‘Radek Zelenka,’” Rodney defended. “Who else could have sent it but you? Or rather me, sleepwalking, since you’re just a figment of my overtired imagination.”

“So you admit you should sleep?” Radek pounced.

“Absolutely not,” Rodney argued, and turned away instead of walking into his room. He chose a corridor at random and headed that way. “I’m fine. I’m just going to… let the equations sit for while.”

“Are you going to run the scan?” Radek asked, hurrying to catch up. They were neither of them tall, but Radek was a little shorter. Rodney often wondered what the real Radek Zelenka — if there _was_ a real Radek Zelenka — was like. 

_His_ Radek was always mussed, close to his own age but with eyes that had seen more trauma, soft and blue and hidden behind thin gold-rimmed glasses. _His_ Radek had grown up with war on the Czech Republic colony of New Prague, coming to Earth to study physics at university. Rodney had been a year into his undergrad when his door had chimed and Radek had been there, a blue duffle bag over his shoulder and a smile on his face. “I’m Radek,” he’d said, stretching out a hand, “Radek Zelenka.”

“You have a stupid name,” Rodney had replied, crossing his arms over his chest instead of shaking Radek's hand, because Radek had probably just gotten off an interstellar transport and Rodney had read about the kind of germs that grew on such ships. “And your accent is weird.”

Radek had only rolled his eyes. That should have been Rodney’s first clue that Radek was a figment of his imagination, the first crack in a psyche that had been growing since he’d hit puberty, since he’d been _born_. He’d always been wrong — too smart, too opinionated, too _loud._

People never just rolled their eyes at him. 

“And you smell,” Radek had said, brushing past Rodney and into the one-room apartment. Rodney had managed to get quarters separate from the rest of the undergraduates, arguing well — and loudly — that his brilliance would be diminished by the presence of so many inferior minds.

Besides, undergraduates didn’t know what proper hand-washing _was_. Rodney might be thrilled to finally be away from home and on his own like he’d wanted since he was nine, but he wasn’t _suicidal._

“What are you doing?” Rodney had asked, ignoring the barb — he didn’t smell, he’d programmed the recipe for the soap himself, guaranteed to remove ninety-nine point four eight percent of harmful bacteria — when Radek had dropped his bag on the floor and stood, glancing around at the small apartment. “You aren’t — no. The administration promised I wouldn’t have a roommate!”

Radek had shrugged. “They promised you wouldn’t have to, how did you put it? Oh yes — ‘contaminate yourself with the ideas of an intellectual worm.’ Lucky for you, I am not.”

“Oh really?” Rodney had sneered. Maybe he’d still been upset about the ‘smell’ comment, or maybe it had been that he really hated people. Always had, always would. “One million, two hundred and ninety-nine thousand, seven hundred and twenty-one?”

“Prime. _Honestly,_ Rodney. One hundred and seventy-nine million, four hundred and twenty-four thousand, six hundred and ninety three.”

“Not prime,” Rodney said. He’d ground his teeth together. “Fine.”

Radek had smiled at him. “Do you not remember me?”

Rodney had stared back. “Uh, no? I think I’d remember a short, strange colonist with a funny accent.”

Radek had rolled his eyes again. “And you call yourself a genius.”

“Hey!” Rodney had protested. “I _am_ a genius!” It was one of the few truths he’d known about himself back then — his name was Rodney McKay, he was a genius, and he was deathly allergic to lemons. He didn’t have friends or a pet, and his family had been as happy to see him leave as he’d been to go, but he was _smart,_ and being smart was what mattered. 

“Radek,” Radek had said again, enunciating slowly. “Radek _Zelenka._

Rodney had squinted. “Gesundheit.”

“Fine,” Radek had said, throwing his hands into the air. “Be stupid, see if I care. I’m taking the bed.”

“What?” Rodney had protested. “No!”

He smiled now to remember. Radek caught his eye and grinned. “We spent the next two days fighting, yes?”

“Yes,” Rodney agreed. “I remember being relieved when Starfleet finally gave in and requisitioned us another bed.” Rodney paused and cocked his head. “Did they really? Or was that just another hallucination?”

Radek shrugged. “I’m not sure. Does it matter?”

Rodney shook his head and kept walking, but inside, he wasn’t so certain. If he really _was_ losing his mind — at least more so than usual — then maybe someone should know about it. He’d spent too long fumbling around not sure what was real and what was not to remember the experience with any fondness.

“What are you thinking?” Radek asked, side-eyeing him.

“Nothing,” Rodney replied, because asking his imaginary friend if he was acting crazier than usual was a stupid way to begin. “Look, we found the Mess. I’m hungry.”

“You’re always hungry,” Radek grumbled, but he followed Rodney in.

The Mess Hall on the _Shield_ was small, just a few scattered tables and a wall of viewports looking out onto the inky blackness of space. The stars were moving gently, light-trails streaming behind them, the artificial visualization created by reflection inside their warp tunnel. 

He wasn’t alone in his appreciation. A familiar mop of black hair was visible at one of the tables, off to the side, with good sightlines to the door. Rodney felt a wave of relief. He hated people, but Sheppard wasn’t people. Sheppard was something different.

Rodney must have been staring again, because Radek poked him. Rodney glared at him, but then glanced back at Sheppard, who’d clearly noticed their arrival. Ignoring both him and Radek, Rodney stomped over to the replicator.

“McKay One, chicken noodle soup, version five,” Rodney said, enunciating clearly. The replicator chirped and began to glow — a moment later a steaming bowl of soup appeared, perfectly seasoned, with two crackers and a warm spoon. “Thank you,” Rodney said. He firmly believed in being polite, but only when politeness was deserved. Computers had the edge over people in that regard.

“Hey Rodney,” Sheppard said, scooting to the side as Rodney made his way to the table and sat down. “You’re up late.”

Rodney shrugged. “I couldn’t sleep.” Beside him, invisible, Radek slid into the third chair. He hadn’t bothered to go to the replicator because he never ate anything. Rodney remembered finding that odd, those first few days back in university, before he’d known the truth of how broken he was. He was used to Radek not eating now. “What time is it, anyways?”

Sheppard looked back out at the stars. “Gamma shift.” He had a mug of hot chocolate in front of him, his hands wrapped around it for warmth. 

Sheppard’s hands were always cold. 

“You know, I can knit,” Rodney said suddenly. Sheppard looked over at him and raised an eyebrow, and Rodney stammered. “I mean, I learned my first year away at school — the professors got mad that I was cutting so many classes, didn’t matter if I turned in my material on time. They argued that if I wasn’t present, I didn’t deserve the grade.”

Sheppard’s lips twitched upwards. “And you didn’t just shout at them?”

“Oh, I did,” Rodney assured him, and was rewarded with a smile, “but I also wanted access to the third-year physics lab, and they wouldn’t give that to me if they were too busy being angry about stupid things that didn’t matter, so I decided to pick my battles.”

“Rodney McKay,” Sheppard said, grinning. “I’m impressed.”

“Don’t be,” Rodney said glumly, “I didn’t last two months. But in those two months, I taught myself to knit.” He shrugged. “I thought it would make sitting still easier.”

“Did it?” 

“No,” Rodney admitted, waving his hands to illustrate his point when Sheppard laughed. “They were just so _wrong!_ It would have been a travesty to let them continue thinking they were less wrong than they were!”

“Of course,” Sheppard said with another grin. “So why did you bring up the knitting?”

“Oh,” Rodney said. He’d almost forgotten. He gestured awkwardly to Sheppard’s hands. “You’re always cold. I could make you some mittens.”

Sheppard glanced down at his hands, surprised. “I’m fine, Rodney.”

“Yeah, but,” Rodney shrugged. “The ship is kept at twenty-two point five degrees celsius, which is comfortable for the majority of species, but you’d feel better at twenty-five, or even twenty-six, I’m sure. I can’t change that, it’s Starfleet regulations and I’d melt at twenty-five degrees, I’m not kidding, it’s disgusting — the sweat, ugh; but I could make you some gloves?” He fiddled with the end of his spoon.

Sheppard blinked. “Thanks,” he said, his voice going soft. He raised the mug of chocolate to his lips and took a sip. Rodney watched him. He was always fascinated by the way that Sheppard’s half-human and half-Romulan genes gave him that particular combination of pink lips with a faint green shimmer. “I’ll think about it.”

“Okay,” Rodney said, and then realized that of course making gloves would take a long time, and he’d probably get at least a finger or two wrong. Sheppard would probably be better off with gloves from the replicator. It made him remember why he’d come down here in the first place instead of going back to his room to sleep. “Hey, Sheppard, can I ask you something?”

Sheppard blinked and lowered his mug. “Anything,” he said, and then looked away and cleared his throat. “I mean, uh, sure. Why?” He tensed. “Are you okay? Is something wrong?”

“Maybe,” Rodney said, fidgeting. He glanced at Radek, who shrugged, and then looked back at Sheppard. “Yes. No. I don’t know.”

Sheppard looked worried. “Rodney, you can ask me anything.”

“Right,” Rodney said, and took a deep breath. “DoIseemcrazierthanusualtoyou?”

Sheppard blinked. “Do you seem — ?”

“... Crazier than usual,” Rodney repeated. He blushed, and then blushed harder when he realized that he was blushing. His double-Irish heritage meant that his cheeks were probably lit up like a Christmas tree. He knew what that looked like, and it wasn’t pretty. “I just — something weird has been going on lately.”

“Like what?” Sheppard asked. He sounded serious. 

Rodney felt relieved. Sheppard would always listen. He would shrug and fiddle with navigation data and sometimes spend days at a time staring at Rodney’s left shoulder and not looking him in the eyes, but Sheppard would _always_ listen. That was reason five on his twelve-point list of why Sheppard wasn’t people. “It started a while ago. Do you remember when the cowboy assassin got here with the sacred chalice of whatsit?”

Sheppard smiled. “You mean Clint Barton and the Sacred Chalice of Rixx?”

Rodney snapped his fingers. “That’s it, the old jar with the dirt still in it.”

“I remember.”

“Right, well,” Rodney fiddled with his spoon again. “I found a message on my personal computer the day after they got on board. It was a request for an in-depth analytical scan of the dirt in the artifact, jar, whatever.” 

Sheppard cocked his head. “Is that unusual?”

Rodney shrugged. “I didn’t think so. I mean, they — whoever sent the message, I didn’t check — wanted a full molecular scan, which is a little more than what Captain Romanova had asked for. She wanted a quick analysis to make sure the Chalice was the real thing, and I did that, no problem, but this meant going back and running it all over again.”

Sheppard nodded. “Okay, and then what happened?”

Rodney glanced at Radek, who nodded encouragingly. “Well, I ran it. I mean, it didn’t take long, I used a medical scanner retrofitted with an anti-theta emission device so I wouldn’t accidentally harm the ancient remains of the lost planet of Rixx, or whatever. I had the scan done in about an hour, and then I uploaded the results and left it at that.”

“You noticed right away that something wasn’t right, though,” Radek murmured.

Rodney shot him a glare. “Not exactly. I noticed that the message actually went through, and that the data was saved to a tertiary folder, but I didn’t follow the trail.”

Sheppard didn’t so much as blink — he was used to Rodney having two conversations at once. “What folder?”

“The puzzle project folder,” Rodney said. At Sheppard’s frown, he explained. “It’s this logic puzzle Radek and I have been working on in our spare time, a game Captain Block brought back from his last shore-leave. He said some Admiral he used to work with had given it to him — it’s a series of molecular puzzle pieces that fit together in an unusual way. The data had been corrupted and at least half the pieces were missing, but that just made it more fun.” Rodney squirmed. “Block gave it to me — I know he was an asshole to you. I didn’t see any reason to mention it before now.”

“He — yeah,” Sheppard admitted, “but it was fine, Rodney. It wasn’t anything I hadn’t heard before.”

“He was a bigot, and an ass,” Rodney said firmly. “I know he was. I know it even better now, after seeing what Captain Romanova’s style of command is like, it’s just — ”

“He was there for you,” Sheppard interrupted. Rodney stopped, and Sheppard met his eyes. “I know he was. He was there for you when you needed him. That’s important.”

Rodney made a face. Block had been his captain during the Dominion War. He’d trusted Rodney when he’d still been on the drugs, and had kept him on board when he’d chucked the medication and Radek had come back. It was because he was brilliant, Rodney knew. Block had helped him remember that being smart was all that mattered.

Unless you were an alien. Unless you weren’t human. Rodney had known Block had always had those opinions — rare, but not unheard of in Starfleet, especially since the Dominion War. It’d become so much more obvious when Sheppard had transferred on board, though. Block had always hated him because he was half-Romulan — alien _and_ untrustworthy, that was what he’d always said. He hadn’t seemed to care that Sheppard hid a razor-sharp mind beneath a mop of stupid hair. 

“Anyways,” Rodney went on, “the dirt from the lost planet of whatsit — the molecular code ended up in the puzzle folder. I went to play with it a few days later and found a missing piece had been inserted. When I ran the comparison, it came up positive.”

Sheppard blinked. “And you have no idea who sent the message?”

Rodney shook his head. “No, and when I went back to look for it, it was gone. There’s no evidence in the computer that it’d ever been sent.” He looked down at his slowly congealing soup. “I figured I’d just made the whole thing up, that the message had been, you know,” he waved a hand over his head without looking up, “another hallucination.”

“Aw, buddy,” Sheppard said. He sounded pained. 

“I’d forgotten what it felt like, not to trust my own mind,” Rodney admitted quietly. “My hallucinations have been stable for so long, I wasn’t prepared for something new.” He was speaking to the tabletop, but he knew both Radek and Sheppard could hear him. “It sucked to remember.”

“I’m sure,” Sheppard said. “So what happened next?”

Rodney swallowed. “I got another message.” He looked up. “About an hour ago, just after Barton and his band of merry men got back on board with the jevonite dagger. The message appeared in my computer, asking me to run an in-depth analytical scan on it, just like on the Betazoid jar. Only…” He took a deep breath. “Only this time the message was signed.”

 

Sheppard stared. “By whom?”

“Radek Zelenka.”

Sheppard blinked. “Oh.”

Rodney looked away. “I don’t remember. I usually know everything that Radek does. He’s always with me, he never — ” Rodney glanced at Radek, who was giving him a sad look “ — he’s never gone off on his own before.” Rodney snorted. “Or rather, _I’ve_ never been crazy enough to do something I couldn’t remember before.”

Sheppard’s face did something complicated. “I hate to ask this,” he said, “but are you _sure?_ Could there have been a time when maybe you did but didn’t know it?”

Rodney’s face fell. “That’s what I’m afraid of. Maybe I’ve been worse off than I thought, maybe I’ve been this way for _years._ Don’t you see, Sheppard?” Rodney met his eyes, knowing his panic was showing. “I don’t _know._ ”

“Okay,” Sheppard soothed, raising his hands. “Okay. So all we have to do is figure this out.”

Rodney laughed. It was a strained, ugly sound. “Yeah? And how exactly are we going to do that?”

“I’m not sure,” Sheppard admitted, “but we will.”

Rodney swallowed. “Do you promise?” He hated that he sounded so young. 

Sheppard nodded. “Yes, Rodney. I promise.”

Rodney took a deep breath in, held it, and glanced at Radek. Radek nodded, so Rodney breathed out. “Okay,” he said. “Okay.”


	2. Chapter Two

“The first thing we should do,” Sheppard said, leading Rodney and Radek out of the Mess, “is access the security files to see if we can pinpoint a time when you were walking around acting strange, like you might not have been yourself.”

Rodney frowned as he hurried to keep him. Sheppard’s legs were longer than his, as thin and hairy and strangely attractive as the rest of him. “How exactly are we going to do that?”

“I hate to be the one to tell you this, Rodney,” Sheppard said, glancing over his shoulder with a smile, “but you’re pretty much a creature of habit. You go from your quarters to the Mess, to the Bridge, and back to your quarters. You don’t vary a lot from there.”

Radek shot him a grin. “This is true.”

Rodney sputtered. “I’ll have you both know I put a lot of very serious thought into going to the holodeck the other day.”

Radek just rolled his eyes, but Sheppard turned around. “Oh?” he asked. He sounded interested. “What program were you going to run?”

Rodney hunched his shoulders. The piano program he’d built and never actually managed to run was still a sore subject for him. “It doesn’t matter.”

Sheppard frowned, but kept walking. They reached the end of the corridor and the turbolift. Rodney and Radek piled in and Sheppard stepped to the side to accommodate Radek, even though he couldn’t see him. “I figured we could go to Engineering,” Sheppard said. “You can use the computer there to sift through internal security reports and highlight any activity you deem suspicious. While you do that, I’ll check out the message and read it myself to see what I think it says. Then we can trace it back through the system together.”

Rodney nodded, relief swamping him. Sheppard really _did_ have a plan. “That makes sense. What should we do about the dagger?”

Sheppard shrugged. “I’m not sure. What do you think we should do?”

“If we run the scan, we risk playing into the hand of whoever sent the message, because it clearly was not me,” Radek said. “If we do not, we lose perhaps a valuable piece of information.” 

Rodney was forced to agree. He repeated Radek’s point for Sheppard.

Sheppard made a face. “Where’s the dagger now?”

“In Engineering, behind a forcefield Dresden built,” Rodney said.

“Great,” Sheppard said, “then we can figure out what we want to do about it once we’re there.” He pressed a button and looked up. “Computer? Take us to Engineering, please.”

The lights warmed and the turbolift started to move. A second later, though, it stopped, and the lights flickered.

Sheppard blinked. “That’s strange.”

Rodney turned to the controls, but before he could reach them, the lights stabilized and the lift started moving again.

“Huh,” Sheppard said. He looked a Rodney. “Probably a glitch.”

“Right,” Rodney said. He glanced at Radek, who frowned. “Sure.”

 

*

 

“What’s Barton got himself into now?” Danielle asked as Natasha tapped her communicator to end the transmission. 

“Nothing,” Natasha assured her, turning in her chair to face her again. “I think our esteemed assassin is having an existential crisis.” She loved Clint like a brother, but he could be such a baby sometimes.

Danielle chuckled. “You mean he’s finally worked out that Coulson has a massive crush on him?”

Natasha eyed her. “You noticed that, did you?” 

Danielle put up her hands. “I didn’t cheat,” she promised. “It’s pretty obvious.”

Natasha felt a stab of guilt. “It is,” she assured Danielle. “I didn’t — ” She stopped. “Chief,” she said. “I mean, Danielle. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sound so accusatory. I know my hesitance regarding telepaths has coloured our interactions in the past. I want you to know that I wasn’t accusing you of anything — I’ve learned by now that your honesty is to be trusted. You’ve promised me many times that you’ll never telepathically scan me, or any of my — of _our_ — crew, and I believe you.”

Danielle bit her lip, but smiled. “Thank you, Captain — I mean, Natasha. That means a lot to me.”

“You’ve earned it,” Natasha said, and meant it. Danielle _had._ If she’d betrayed her promise, Natasha would be in the brig by now, or rather, in the deepest, darkest cell they could find for her in Starfleet. “Besides, you’re right — Coulson’s crush _is_ pretty obvious.”

“Exactly,” Danielle agreed with a grin. “The darting looks and the perpetual scowl and the way he doesn’t ever — _ever_ — watch Barton’s behind as he walks away.” She leaned back on the couch in Natasha’s ready room. “It’s cute, and better than a holovid. You’d never get drama like this on Betazed.”

Natasha smiled and relaxed into her own chair. Her duty shift had long since ended, but she was in no hurry to leave if Danielle was content to sit. The Security Chief had come to report on the day’s activities. Usually Coulson as First Officer oversaw such activity, but Natasha had relieved him to get some post-mission rest. “I suppose on a planet full of telepaths, there’d be no secret pining.”

“Not so much,” Danielle agreed with a chuckle. “We enjoy humour in romance, and there are many great and famous stories about the trouble a group of lovers can get into even _with_ the ability to read each other’s minds, but nothing quite like this.”

Natasha smiled. “And you love it.” 

Danielle grinned. “I do.”

Natasha pressed her lips together. “Why do I get the impression you were the undisputed queen of gossip onboard your old ship?”

“Why, Captain,” Danielle said guilelessly, her liquid brown eyes going wide, “the crew of the _U.S.S. Tian An Men_ benefited incontrovertibly from my efforts.”

“Oh, did they?” Natasha teased.

“Why of course,” Danielle said. “For example, there was one _particular_ crew member who — and I shall not name names — would still be _miserable_ without my efforts. Fortunately for him, he is now the middle partner in a very handsome threesome because I happened to overhear a thing or two and repeat it in very discreet ways.”

Natasha grinned. “I’m glad it worked out for him.”

“Oh, it worked out for them _all,_ ” Danielle assured her with a cat-like smile. “And they were very appreciative of my efforts.”

Natasha blinked, her mind suddenly going to _very_ inappropriate places. She felt a pang, and realized it was jealousy. The feeling shocked her. 

Danielle didn’t seem to notice. Her gaze was far away. “True Rigelian chocolate. It took them a month to import it.” She licked her lips. “Exquisite.”

Oh. Natasha felt a flush starting, and shut it down hard. Instinct long-since trained into her flared, and she found herself reciting Cardassian multiplication tables to clear her head. When she’d regained rationality, she said, “That sounds delicious. Since you’re here, actually, I thought we might talk for a moment about our next move in regards to the investigation.”

Danielle straightened immediately, effortlessly switching gears. Natasha refused to find that attractive. “Yes, of course. What do you suggest?”

Natasha shrugged. “We now possess an artifact our mysterious buyer desires. I thought we could use it to draw them out of the shadows.”

Danielle nodded. “I was thinking the same thing. I realize such material exchanges are usually done through an intermediary, but it might be possible to draw the buyer out by sweetening the pot.” She hesitated. “I’ve been in contact with Ambassador Troi of Betazed. If whoever the buyer is was interested in the Sacred Chalice of Rixx, then they may wish to acquire the Holy Rings of Betazed as well. The Rings are, in many ways, as important as the Chalice, but while the last remains of our sister planet Rixx are priceless, the Rings have more sentimental value. The Ambassador is willing to risk them if it aids us in capturing our quarry.”

Natasha stared. “That is.... exceedingly generous of her. How did you get her to agree to it?”

Danielle flushed. “I am somewhat acquainted with the Ambassador. I assisted her when we re-took Betazed from Dominion control, and she feels as though she owes me a debt.”

“Thank you. I agree, adding the Rings would make it more likely that — ” A beep from her computer distracted Natasha. She glanced over at it, and then frowned. “That’s strange.”

Danielle looked. “What?”

Natasha leaned forward. Her computer screen had been dark while they talked, but without warning, it had suddenly flared to life. While she watched, the screen paused on a white screen, flickered once, and then went black again. “A system reset?”

Danielle blinked. “Could be a computer glitch.”

“It could be,” Natasha said slowly, but her pulse was racing. She tapped her communicator. “Harry?”

“Hmm?” The sleepy voice of Harry Dresden, chief engineer and self-proclaimed Wizard of the _U.S.S. Shield,_ sounded clear over the comm. “What?”

“Something’s wrong with the computer,” Natasha said. “I’m sorry to wake you, but could you — ” She stopped. The black screen faded and was replaced by a cursor. A moment later, a line of code began to scroll across the screen. 

Natasha felt her stomach drop into her boots.

“Computer,” she said, urgency driving her to her feet. “Lockdown primary systems, authorization code pacifica-seven-eleven-nine-four-charlie-bravo.”

The computer chimed. _‘Authorization code accepted. Locking down pr—_ ’ It stopped. The line of code paused, the screen flashed, and then the entire screen went black.

_‘Authorization code invalid,’_ the computer said. _‘Initializing program London Bridge.’_

“No,” Natasha whispered. Above her, the overhead lights flickered and died. The deck beneath her feet shivered. The engines whined in protest and then faded into silence, the stars outside her ready room window stilling. The red emergency lights came on and something ionic in the atmosphere vanished.

Danielle was on her feet, looking out the window. “We’ve dropped out of warp!”

“It’s worse than that,” Natasha said grimly, patting the holster on her hip and feeling beneath her desk for her second phaser. “Our shields are down.”

 

*

 

“You’re all done,” Baz said, helping Clint sit up. “How does that feel?”

“Better,” Clint admitted, rolling one shoulder. The last lingering soreness was gone and every bruise had been healed. “You wield a mean dermal regenerator, Doc.”

“I should, with the practice you lot give me,” Baz said, but his tone was more tired than anything. He still looked small, defeated in a way Clint hadn’t seen before. “Go on, get out of here. Get some sleep.”

“I will,” Clint promised. He slid off the medical table and stood up. “Hey, Doc, you know, Simon — ” Clint swallowed. “Simon doesn’t mean to make it hard for you.”

Baz snorted. “Sure he doesn’t.”

Clint pressed his lips together. “It’s true. People like us, like Simon and me, we forget that someone might be looking out for us. That someone might care.”

Baz eyed him. “Simon has lots of people who care about him.”

“Yeah,” Clint agreed, “but he’s probably crap at recognizing it. I read his file, okay? I get it. My parents were killed when I was little, too.”

Baz sighed. “I appreciate the sympathy, Clint, but Simon’s not in the same category you are — he was adopted by his uncle, who forwarded his application to Starfleet. Simon stayed with him every holiday while we were at the Academy. It is simply that he hates me, and has ever since we were roommates. Not,” he admitted, “that I’m entirely blameless in that regard, but his problem lies with me. I’m aware of that.”

“Okay,” Clint said. He awkwardly stuck his hands into his pockets. “If you say so, you know him best.”

“To my eternal regret,” Baz agreed wryly. The door chimed, and Baz turned towards it with a tired smile. “Ensign Simmons, you’re late. I was beginning to wonder — ”

He stopped. Standing in the doorway was not Jemma Simmons, but Simon Snow. The young Lieutenant was dressed in his regular uniform, black pants and shirt with a jacket trimmed in gold to indicate his position in Ops. “Um, hi.”

Baz and Clint both stared at him. Simon fidgeted. “If you’re busy,” he said, already stepping back, “I can wait until...”

“No!” Baz said, starting forward. He stopped and shoved his hands into his blue medical jacket, arranging a scowl on his face. “You’re late enough as it is, you might as well come in now.”

Simon shifted his weight from foot to foot, but stepped inside. The door slid shut behind him. “Yeah,” he said. “Er, sorry about that.”

“Whatever,” Baz said, sniffing. “It’s not like I was waiting for you or anything.”

Simon frowned and opened his mouth, but Clint shot him a look.

“Anyways, thanks, Doc,” Clint said, a little louder than he normally would have. “I feel much better now. I should have come to you straight away.”

Baz gave him a look that said he knew _exactly_ what Clint was doing, but then waved him off. “Yes, you should have. I don’t want to hear about you skipping out on any more post-medical checks.”

Clint knew he probably wouldn’t, anyway. It hadn’t gotten him the reaction he’d wanted from Phil. “Sure thing.” He turned away and met Lieutenant Snow's eyes once more. “Hey, Simon.”

“Hey,” Simon said, looking at him oddly. “You okay?”

“Yup, just got back from the mission to Lissepia.” 

“How did it go?”

“Oh, you know,” Clint said with a shrug, “backstabbing, blackmailing scumbags with delusions of grandeur, and that was _before_ we got mixed up with the Orions.” He stepped towards the doors of Medical. “Same old, same old.” Instead of opening, though, the doors remained stubbornly shut. Clint frowned at them. “That’s odd.”

Simon stepped towards him, but before he could get far, the lights all dimmed. Baz’s medical scanners flickered twice and then the screens went dark. Simon looked around. “What the hell?”

Baz frowned. “It must be some sort of power surge. Probably Harry fiddling with the engines again.”

“Maybe,” Simon said slowly, and then blinked when the red emergency lights came on. Clint tried the doors again, but they refused to open. 

“Bloody hell,” Baz grumbled. “Computer?”

Nothing happened. The computer stayed silent, the doors stayed closed. 

Simon looked worried. “Something is seriously wrong.”

Clint found himself nodding, his gut clenching. “Yeah,” he agreed. “Maybe — ” They all started when a knock sounded at the door.

It was someone outside of Medical. “Uh, Doctor?” called a female voice. “Are you in there?”

Baz stepped forward. “Ensign Simmons? Is that you?”

“Yes, sir,” Jemma Simmons replied, her voice slightly muffled. “Is everything alright? The lights in the corridor are out.”

“They are in here as well,” Baz informed her. “The computer seems to be malfunctioning.”

“That’s a word for it,” Simon muttered.

Clint’s pulse was racing. He’d worked as a mercenary for more years than he cared to remember — he knew what sort of people disabled a ship before boarding it. “Everyone needs to get to battle stations.”

Baz made a face. “Isn’t that a little premature? I agree, something is clearly wrong, but I don’t — ”

“Battle stations,” Clint said firmly. “ _Now._ ”

“How?” Simon asked. “We’re stuck in here, and as for the rest of the crew, well, we can’t exactly make a systems-wide announcement.”

“Good point,” Clint said. “Shit, the crew is going to be completely blindsided. Okay, new plan — the two of you stay here and set up a medical facility with whatever you have on hand that doesn’t require the computer. I have a bad feeling we’re going to need it.”

Baz scowled but started grabbing supplies. “What are you going to do?” 

“I’m going to find out what’s going on.”

“How?” Simon asked.

“The Jefferies Tubes,” Clint said, already scanning the ceiling. The long, narrow maintenance shafts criss-crossed the ship — Clint had memorized their layout his first night on board. “I can get out and report back.”

“That sounds like a good idea,” Ensign Simmons said through the door. “Drop off a few hyposprays for me and I’ll set up a secondary triage bay in the Mess. If there are injured, some of them might make their way there.”

“Good thinking,” Baz called back to her, and then turned back to the group. “In the meantime, maybe we can find some way to get this door open. Lieutenant Snow, do you think you could — ?”

But Simon was shaking his head. “I’ve got to get to the Bridge.”

“You’re still injured,” Baz argued. “You haven’t been returned to the duty roster.”

“Barton said get to battle stations,” Simon insisted. 

“No,” Clint said, already throwing hyposprays into a bag, “the Doc is right, you need to find some way to get this door open. People are going to need Medical, and you and Baz will feel pretty stupid trapped behind a locked door.”

Simon looked like he wanted to disagree, but Baz spoke over him, looking at Clint. “Where are you going to go?”

“The Bridge, if I can make it, but Engineering if I can’t,” Clint said. He hoisted the bag over his shoulder. “Simmons, are you still there?”

“I’m here.”

“Okay, wait for me, I’ll be there in a second.” Clint stepped beneath a flat ceiling panel with a double-latch. He unhooked it and ducked beneath the opening, securing the bag across his shoulders before jumping to find handholds and then hoisting himself up into the dim tunnel. There was a bulkhead-access on the other side of the medbay, of course, but the path it took would force him to double back. This way would be quicker. 

“You’re going to need a weapon,” Simon said, standing beneath him and handing up another bag filled with hyposprays.

Clint lifted his wrist. “I have my bow.”

Simon shook his head. “Get to the armoury on Deck Six. You’ll need a senior staff member to open it, but if you’re right and we’re about to be invaded, you’ll need more than a bow and a few trick arrows.”

Clint wanted to argue that he could do a lot with a few trick arrows, but he had to admit that having more firepower sounded good to him. “The senior staff will be busy.”

“What about Commander Coulson?” Baz asked.

Clint's heart stuttered in his chest. “Phil?”

“Yeah. He said he’d be heading to bed after his medical check.”

“Good point,” Clint said. He had a sudden vision of Phil sleeping soundly before a wave of invaders flooded his room and shot him in his bed. “I’ll, uh, try to swing by and find him on my way up to the Bridge.”

Baz nodded. “Good luck.”

“You, too,” Clint said. He grabbed the Jefferies Tube door, ready to slide it back into place, but met Baz’s eyes before he did. “Get ready for casualties. If the main computer is offline, I bet shields are down, and that means the ship is vulnerable. Find a phaser and defend Medical.” Clint scooted backwards into the tube. “Good luck.”

“You, too,” Simon and Baz said in unison, before stopping to glare at each other. Clint slid the door back into place and heard one of them refastening the latch on the other side. Now that he was moving, his heart began to pound in earnest. He hurried through the crawlspace, turning left at the first intersection, and then right. He orientated himself to the corridor outside of Medical and found the bulkhead-hatch. He opened it, and found Simmons standing there, ready for the bag of supplies. 

“Here,” Clint told her, handing over a bag. “Good luck.”

“You, too,” she told him. She looked serious, but not panicked. Clint felt a surge of pride. This was a good crew. “Kick some arse.”

“Will do,” Clint promised. He closed the latch behind him and re-orientated himself, then started off towards Phil’s quarters. They weren’t far, so Clint could swing by, pick him up, and then get to the armoury on Deck Six. Together they could head up to the the Bridge and back Natasha up against whatever threat was out there. 

It was a good plan. Unfortunately, Clint was only halfway to Phil’s quarters when he heard the first faint whine of a transporter.

 

*

 

Phil was jolted out of sleep — of a lovely, if improbable, dream of kissing Clint Barton — by a sudden jarring shift. He blinked and opened his eyes, re-orientating himself, before glancing out his viewport and confirming that something was seriously wrong. The ship had dropped out of warp. There was no way they’d arrived at their destination yet, because Captain Romanova and Chief Cage hadn’t even settled on a transmission location, deciding they’d make their way back to Starbase G-6 before finalizing a plan. Phil levered himself out of bed and tugged on a uniform, reaching for his sidearm even as he tapped his communicator. “Bridge? This is Commander Coulson. Report.”

Nothing happened.

Phil blinked and checked his combadge, then checked the power reading on his phaser and kept it in one hand instead of holstering it at his side. “Computer, mission status.”

There was no response. Phil frowned as he tried to remember what was going on. He’d gone to Lissepia with Barton and Dresden. Barton had been hurt. Phil clenched his left hand into a fist when he remembered how Barton had stepped towards him as the floor had crumbled, the look in his eye, a combination of pure stubbornness and fear, and then they’d both been falling, falling…

He shook his head. Barton had been injured, but the Orions had patched him up, and the giant idiot had even refused to go to Medical when they’d gotten back to the _Shield._ Phil had considered ordering him to go, but he’d been afraid that if he so much as opened his mouth, more than he wanted to say would come pouring out. How scared he’d been, how furious he was, how much he _wanted_ Clint, wanted him _always_...

Oh, no.

Memory returned in a sudden jolt, like an icy shot to the spine. Barton coming to his quarters. Barton talking. Phil so furious and tired he had no words left to say. He remembered pulling Barton in, remembered his hands on either side of Barton’s head, remembered _kissing him..._

“No,” Phil breathed. No, no, no. He didn’t. He _couldn’t have._ He’d withstood his crush for so long, for _years._ There was no way he’d shown his hand just because of a little fear and fatigue, no way that he’d — 

The sharp whine of a transporter beam cut off his spiraling thoughts. Phil tightened his hand around his phaser and concentrated — the sound had come from just outside his quarters. There was no reassuring call of Starfleet officers, though, no request for information or an update. Phil quieted his breathing and stepped forward, concentrating hard, his heart a dull, distant thud in his chest. 

There were at least two of them, footsteps heavy enough to feel faintly through the floor. Phil doubled back to his bathroom and popped open the Jefferies Tube there, scaled the ladder and made a quick left, hopping down through the ceiling to come out in the corridor just behind the two intruders. He peered around the corner and stared.

They were Nausicaans. 

Phil paused, his heart hammering, unsure what to do. He only had one phaser. There was no way he could win in a fight against two Nausicaans with one phaser…

There was a quiet thud above his head. Phil looked up to see someone poking their head out of the Jefferies Tube. The sight made him blink. “Barton?”

“Phil!” Barton said, too loudly. “You’re awa— ”

Phil hurriedly made a slashing movement, but it was too late. The two Nausicaans in the corridor ahead of him turned. One grunted, the other growled, and they both raised their weapons.

Phil fired even before he’d consciously made the decision to attack. He shot at the one on the right, hitting it in the shoulder, hoping against hope that his phaser would do _something_ against the legendary toughness of a Nausicaan. He could turn up the power on his phaser, but the memory of the fight on Starbase G-6 rose up and choked him, how his phaser had burned a hole right through the Nausicaan’s chest as it stepped forward to stab Barton. 

He didn’t regret it, but he did want to avoid it from happening again if he could. Besides, Phil had no idea what was going on here. He wanted the Nausicaans alive for questioning, if possible.

Barton obviously had the same idea, because he tumbled forward out of the Jefferies Tube, somersaulting as he fell, rising to his feet with his bow already extended and an arrow nocked. “What the hell are these guys doing here?” he asked, arrow already flying, crossing the space between them and the invaders, impaling the Nausicaan on the right in the opposite shoulder from the one Phil had hit.

“No idea,” Phil told him, firing again. His phaser was set to maximum stun, so he shot the Nausicaan on the right straight in face, hoping to subdue him.

It worked, sort of. The Nausicaan stumbled, anyway. His arms didn’t seem to be working quite right either, so he couldn’t return fire. Clint and Phil both turned their attention to the Nausicaan on the left.

“Drop your weapon,” Phil called out. 

The Nausicaan bellowed instead of answering, rushing forward. Phil and Clint both shot him, and then shot him again. He stumbled, but managed to make it within three feet of them before Phil’s last stun blast finally dropped him to the ground.

“Tough bastards,” Clint wheezed, and Phil would have agreed, except at that moment the Nausicaan on the right lurched to his feet and, fumbling a knife from his belt, hurled it towards them.

Phil moved without thinking, throwing himself at Barton and crashing them both to the ground. The knife whizzed by over his head. 

Barton snarled and, grabbing Phil’s phaser from his hand, shot. The Nausicaan toppled.

Phil realized he was breathing hard. “Is he dead?”

“Maybe,” Barton said, sounding angry. “Are you okay?”

“I think so,” Phil said, raising a hand to his head. It hurt.

“Shit, you’re bleeding,” Barton said, rolling to his knees. “Here.” He shrugged his jacket off and pressed it against Phil’s forehead, and then dragged him across the corridor and into an unused storage room. The door was, thankfully, open. “There, just in case one of them wakes up. How’s your head?”

Phil glanced around the room, confirming it was empty. “It’s okay, it’s just a graze. The knife must have winged me as it went by.”

Clint shook his head. “You shouldn’t have done that,” he said. He looked pale.

“What?” Phil asked, staring at him in honest confusion. “Ducked?”

“No, thrown yourself on top of me,” Barton argued. “You idiot. You’re too important to do that.”

“No, I’m not,” Phil said. “ _You’re_ the important one. Stars, Barton — we’re on the hunt for a captain-killer and you’re the man with the information, the one who has the skills and experience we need.”

“Yeah, well, _you’re_ the only reason I’m here in the first place!” Clint shouted. “You’ve saved my life how many times now?” He shook his head. “I’m only here because of you. I’ve only _stayed_ because of you. Do you think I’d have agreed to work on board a Federation starship for anyone else?”

His hands were still holding the jacket against Phil’s head, and his face was very, very close. Phil found himself licking his lips. “There’s Natasha,” he said softly. “I know you’re closer to her than either of you want to admit.”

“Natasha is like family,” Clint agreed, his voice just as quiet, “but she’s been in Starfleet for years, and I’ve never given them the time of day before. It’s _you._ You’re the one who convinced me that staying wasn’t the last option I had, that there was something right, something — fuck — even _noble_ about what it is that Starfleet does.”

Phil stared. “How? All I ever did was chase you.”

“You’ve done so much more than that. I’ve watched you, Phil. I’ve studied you. Hell, I know the only reason you were on Betazed in the first place was because you answered when they requested help. You had no idea I was even there.”

Phil scowled. “I thought you were making a run for Velex Prime.”

“Got you again,” Barton said with a grin. 

“Yes, you did. You _always_ did. Every time I thought I had you, you ran; every time I thought I’d nailed you down, you escaped. It was maddening.”

Barton swallowed. His eyes were heavy on Phil’s. “I’m not running now.”

“No, you’re not,” Phil breathed. Barton was there — _right there_ — and he wasn’t running. In fact, he was leaning closer. 

Phil licked his lips. “Fair warning,” he said, “if you don’t move, I’m going to kiss you again.”

“ _Please,_ ” Barton whispered.

Phil didn’t need to be asked twice.

 

*

 

“We need a plan,” Phil said, a moment later. He’d love to stay and nibble on Clint’s lower lip some more, but the ship’s peril had to take priority.

“I have a plan,” Clint said, darting in to plant one last kiss on the corner of Phil’s mouth before rolling to his feet and peering back out into the corridor. “It’s called kill all the bad guys and save the day and then take you to bed and rock your world.”

Phil couldn’t help but smile. “I think that’s a pretty good plan,” he admitted, confirming that the coast was clear and following Clint back down the corridor to where they left the Nausicaans, “but there are a few details we need to work out.”

“Right,” Cint said, holding up a fist as they rounded the corner, and then lowering it when it became clear that neither of the aliens had moved. “I’m thinking, first I’ll take all your clothes off, and then maybe I’ll — ”

Phil rolled his eyes as he moved towards the first Nausicaan, confirming they were dead. “I meant about the saving the day part.”

Clint stopped and grinned at him, the same wide, shit-eating smile he’d given him on Regor Eight, except this time it was softer, fonder, and somehow even _more_ attractive. “Oh, _that_ plan. Well, my initial aim in getting here was to ask you to help me open the armoury on Deck Six.”

Phil found himself nodding. “Good idea.” The second Nausicaan was still alive, so Phil took one of his arms and started dragging him back to the storage room. Clint quickly came forward and helped. “There’s no way we’ll take back the ship from a bunch of Nausicaans with just your bow and my phaser.” His phaser was probably more than half-drained by this point, too. 

“There you go, doubting my skills again,” Clint teased. Despite the weight of the Nausicaan, he looked energized and ready to take on the universe. “You and Simon — doubt, doubt, doubt.”

Phil gave him a dry look. “I know you have skills, Clint, better than anyone. You’ve used them to embarrass me for the past two years.”

Clint, for some reason, frowned. “I didn’t…” 

He trailed off as the reached the storage room and dropped the Nausicaan inside. Phil frowned at him. “You didn’t what?”

“I didn’t really mean to be such an asshole to you.”

Phil raised an eyebrow.

Clint laughed, a little shakily. “Okay, so, I _did_ , but not, like, in a bad way. Mostly I just wanted to get away.” 

“I know,” Phil told him honestly. “I didn’t even want to catch you after a while, not really, because it was so much _fun,_ but I could never just let you go.” His mouth twisted into a smile. “Especially not after Regor Eight.”

“Oh, Regor Eight,” Clint said, a little wistfully. “Good times.”

Phil shook his head, but led the way back into the corridor. “Regor Eight was the first time I’d seen you face-to-face. I was more distracted than I wanted to admit.” He thought back to the ribbing he’d gotten once he’d returned to Headquarters. It had never really stopped. 

Clint grinned. “Distracted by my winning personality?”

“By your ass.”

Clint blinked. “Oh,” he said, and then started searching the second Nausicaan. “Let’s mop this mess up and then find a bed, pronto. I’ve got a lot of time to make up for.”

Phil chuckled, but it changed to a sigh when Clint’s search came up empty. “Nothing?”

Clint shook his head. “No data pads, no written orders, nothing to indicate who might have sent them here.” He frowned. “Also no rope.”

Phil made a face. “I wish we had some way to secure the injured one.”

“Hmm,” Clint said, and then jogged back to the Jefferies Tube he’d first appeared under, coming back with a bag full of hyposprays. “Maybe there’s something here we can use?”

“Good idea,” Phil said. He rifled through. “This one’s a sedative,” he said, holding up a hypospray, “but I don’t know the dosage for Nausicaans.”

“Me neither,” Clint admitted. “I’m sure Baz would.”

“I wish we had time to head back and ask him, but we need to push on to the Armoury.” Phil dialed up the dosage and gave the Nausicaan two injections. “There. I think that’s as sure as we can be.”

“Okay,” Clint said. “To the Armoury?”

“Yes,” Phil said. “We should go left — the quickest way would be Jefferies Tube L-Seven.”

“No,” Barton argued, “we should go right and take M-Six, and then Six-Four to the armory.”

Phil blinked. “No, we’d take L-Seven, and then N-Four, and then — ” He stopped. “Damn, you’re right.”

Clint grinned. “I always am.”

“You’re absolutely not.”

“Okay, I’m not,” Clint agreed, “but I always knew you’d catch me, and I wasn’t wrong about that.” He gave Phil a frankly lascivious look. “I never knew you’d look so hot doing it, though.”

Phil snorted, but he was smiling again. “Shut up and take point, Hawkeye. Keep your bow up and at the ready.”

“Aye aye, sir,” Clint said, snapping off a mocking salute. He winked at Phil as he sauntered in front of him, and Phil, giving into the urge he’d had since Regor Eight, allowed his eyes to drift down to watch Barton’s ass as he walked away.

Damn. 

It was just as good as he remembered.

 

*

 

“The lift is stuck,” Rodney pronounced. They were standing in the dark, the dim red emergency lights their only illumination. “Something must be wrong with the computer.”

“This does not feel like Engineer Dresden’s usual tinkering,” Radek said nervously. 

Sheppard shook his head. “It’s more than the computer — can you feel that?” He indicated the deck. “The ship has fallen out of warp.” He cocked his head. “And the shields are down.”

“How can you know that?” Rodney asked with a scowl. 

“He’s right,” Radek said. “I can feel it also.”

“Technopaths, the both of you,” Rodney groused, but he had to admit there was something a little less ionic hanging around in the atmosphere. “Okay, fine — so the computer is off, the ship is dead, and our shields are apparently down. What are we going to do?”

Sheppard pursed his lips. “I need to get you to Engineering — you can help Harry fix the computer.”

“It depends on what’s been done to it,” Rodney pointed out.

Sheppard just shrugged. “Between the two of you, you can fix anything.”

Rodney preened. “Okay, yes, that is true.”

Radek rolled his eyes. “Fine, so how do we get to Engineering?”

Sheppard was already reaching above his head for the emergency latch in the ceiling of the turbolift. It clicked under his fingers and a large section swung down. A ladder lowered to their feet. Rodney looked from the ladder up to the echoing space of the long, narrow turbolift shaft. 

“There,” Sheppard said. “We can climb out and onto the emergency ladder — from there it’s a short Jefferies Tube crawl to Engineering.”

Rodney swallowed. He’d gotten the handle on the majority of his neuroses, present hallucinations excluded, of course, but he still had a few.

“Rodney....” Radek started.

“I’ll be fine,” Rodney said, swallowing thickly. “I’ll be — I need to get to Engineering.”

“Do you have a problem with ladders?” Sheppard asked.

Rodney shook his head. “Heights.”

“Oh,” Sheppard said, looking around. “Um, well, we might be able to use the internal power reserves of our communicators to — ”

Rodney cut him off. “What, move the turbolift? No, don’t be an idiot, that would never work.” He swallowed. “It’s fine. I can do this.”

Sheppard watched him carefully. “Okay,” he said after a moment. “We can try.”

“I _can,_ ” Rodney insisted. He reached up and hooked one hand around the ladder, pulling himself up. “See?” 

“Good job,” Sheppard said, helping Rodney find a toehold. “Right there, good. Just keep going. Wait for me at the top of the ladder.”

“Sure,” Rodney said, his face going green. _Don’t look down, don’t look down._ “Okay.”

He distracted himself by focusing on the immediate task, which was Find The Next Handhold So I Don’t Plummet To My Death And Die. When he reached the top, he kept his gaze on the rungs under his feet and not on the smooth sides of the turbolift shaft all around them. 

“The magnetic field of electromagnets is defined by Ampere’s Law,” Radek recited, still standing inside the turbolift, “which, for a closed loop system, is the sum of the length element times the magnetic field in the direction of the length element, which is equal to the permeability times the electric current enclosed in the loop.”

Rodney took a deep breath, held it in, and then nodded. “The relation of field to source is quantified by Gauss’s Law,” he continued, breathing out, “which states that the total of the electric flux out of a closed surface is equal to the charge enclosed divided by the permittivity.”

Sheppard ascended from the lift, looking much more attractive while he did so than Rodney was sure _he_ had a moment ago. He was smiling. “Absolutely, which means that we’re safe here, and the turbolifts are not going to fall; they just aren’t going to move without external power.”

Rodney nodded. “Right.” Behind Sheppard, Radek was making his way up. “Okay, so, now what?”

Sheppard indicated the ladder on the side of the turboshaft to Rodney’s left. Unlike the short, first one that led out of the turbolift, this one would bring them thirty meters up and to the entrance of the next Jefferies Tube. “Now we cross to here and keep climbing.” He eyed Rodney. “Do you want me to go first?”

Rodney shook his head. “If you’re behind me, I don’t have to watch my back.”

Sheppard gave him a crooked smile. “Aw, Rodney, you _do_ trust me.”

“Of course I do,” Rodney said, affronted. “That was never in question.”

Sheppard’s face did something complicated. “Okay,” he said, and his voice sounded hoarse. He cleared his throat. “Good. I mean, I trust you, too.”

Rodney rolled his eyes. “Obviously. I’m a genius, after all.”

Sheppard touched his shoulder. “That’s not all you are,” he said seriously.

Rodney sucked in a breath and met his eyes. They stared at each other for a moment, and then Sheppard nodded to the ladder. “Better get going.”

“Right,” Rodney said, and then swallowed. He stepped carefully to the left, finding a secure foothold, and then transferred his weight. He shuddered, but the ladder held firm, and a moment later, Rodney started to climb. “Let’s go.”

 

*

 

It took them the better part of a quarter-hour to reach the Jefferies Tubes, though Rodney knew that Sheppard could have made it alone in half that time. Probably less. Rodney kept shaking and shivering, though, and had to pause before going farther.

“You’re doing fine, you’re doing great,” Sheppard kept telling him. He always sounded sincere, even the sixth and seventh times. “You’re good, Rodney.”

Rodney had sucked in a breath and nodded, and — eventually — they’d made it to level ground. The Jefferies Tube extended horizontally away from the turbolift shaft and towards Engineering. They still had a distance to travel, but it would be on hands and knees and not ladders from now on.

“Excellent, Rodney,” Sheppard said, following Rodney into the Jefferies Tube and waiting with him until he stopped shaking. “That was amazing, I’m so proud of you.”

“I — I — I’m sorry,” Rodney managed to stutter. “I know I’m slowing you down.”

Sheppeard shook his head. “It’s fine, I’d be no use without you, anyway.”

“That’s not true,” Rodney said, finally able to turn and put one hand in front of the other. “You’re rather intelligent under all that hair.”

“My — ?” Sheppard kept pace behind him. He sounded surprised. “What’s wrong with my hair?”

“Seriously?” Rodney asked. “It’s so — puffy. And thick. And black.” He gestured, even though Sheppard probably couldn’t see it. “And there’s so much of it.”

“You mean unlike your thin wisps,” Radek teased from somewhere behind Sheppard.

“Hey,” Rodney snapped. “I’ll have you know that my large forehead makes me look distinguished.”

“It does,” Sheppard agreed. He coughed. “We’re, uh, almost there.”

“What?” Rodney said, surprised. “No we aren’t.”

“We’re closer than we were,” Sheppard pointed out.

Rodney snorted. “Yeah, by thirty _meters._ ”

“We should get out here, though, or rather, I should — I need to scout ahead before we burst into Engineering,” Sheppard explained.

“Oh,” Rodney said. He thought it through. “I guess that makes sense.” They still had no idea why the computer was down. He grabbed at Sheppard’s sleeve before he could slip past. “Hey. Be careful, okay?”

Sheppard met his eyes. Rodney was suddenly aware of how close he was. The Jefferies Tube wasn’t large, and Sheppard was pressed nearly shoulder-to-hip against his side. “I will.”

“Um, good,” Rodney said. What had they been talking about again? Sheppard’s tongue darted out and wet his bottom lip and Rodney was pretty sure fifty million brain cells just died. “Good.”

Sheppard grinned, and then he was gone. Rodney blinked, lost until Radek started chuckling, and then he abruptly recalled where he was and what they were doing. He scowled back at his hallucination. “Shut up.”

“Me? I didn’t say anything,” Radek defended.

Rodney heroically ignored him, turning to tap at a nearby control panel and scowling when it remained stubbornly dark. He patted himself down to see what power sources he might have available, and found none, except for his comm link.

Rodney fingered it and thought. The small internal power source wouldn’t have had enough juice to get the turbolift moving, but maybe there’d be enough of a spark to initialize a display panel?

Radek was shaking his head. “ _Ne,_ ” he said. “It would have to be a walled-off system, low amperage, or the power would be absorbed into the ship-wide mainframe and lost.”

Rodney nodded. “Right, good point. Where — ?”

He stopped when Sheppard came careening back around the corner, his face tight, expressed closed. “Nausicaans.”

Rodney felt his heart kick. “What?”

“We have Nausicaans,” Sheppard repeated. “I saw at least two in the corridors making their way to Engineering.” 

“That’s impossible.”

Sheppard shook his head. “I saw them, Rodney. We’ve been boarded.”

“Okay, okay…” Rodney considered and discarded a half dozen scenarios. “The first thing we have to do is secure the ship; we can figure out why this is all happening later. I need to restart the main computer, initialize the shields, and get the transporters working so we can beam these pirates back to wherever they came from.”

“They must have a ship nearby,” Sheppard agreed. “Hidden, maybe under cloak. Somehow, they got the _Shield_ to drop out of warp and disrupted the main computer and then beamed on board.”

Rodney shook his head. “They never would have convinced Romanova to drop out of warp, have you met that woman? She’s more paranoid than a Cardassian. No, somehow they got a worm in our system and it shut down the main computer.”

Sheppard frowned. “A worm, you mean a computer virus? But how would they — ?” His expression went flat. “You’re talking about treachery, Rodney.”

Rodney pressed his lips together. “I know.”

They stared at each other for a moment, and then Sheppard shook his head. “Okay, first thing’s first — we need to get you to Engineering.”

“Yes,” Rodney said, and then stopped. “Wait, no.” He gestured to Radek. “We have an idea.”


	3. Chapter Three

“If we’ve dropped out of warp and our shields are down, we have to assume that we’re being boarded,” Danielle said, taking out her phaser and checking the charge.

“I agree,” Natasha said. Now that she’d retrieved the secondary backup phaser she kept under her desk, she had a weapon in each hand, as well as the knives in her boots, the garrote wire at her back, and the stun weapons sewn into her sleeves. “Power is down, so we’ll have to open the door with suction pads.” She always kept a pair on hand just in case. 

Danielle nodded and stepped forward, trying her communicator just in case, and shaking her head when it did nothing. “Communication is down.” She put an ear against the door of the ready room and frowned. “Nothing.” She closed her eyes. “I’m sensing Starfleet officers only, no sign of...” She stopped, her expression tightening. “I hear transporters.”

Natasha quickly retrieved the pads, which were basically electroceramic disks with handles attached, which could be used to pull apart sliding doors when power was down, and tossed one to Danielle. “On three.”

Danielle attached her pad to the left side of the door and readied her phaser. “One — ”

Natasha did the same to the right and balanced on the balls of her feet. “Two — ”

On three they wrenched apart the doors and dived forward. Danielle went high and Natasha went low, each taking stock of the situation and firing simultaneously. The transporter beams had just completed their cycles and deposited their boarders — _Nausicaans,_ Natasha thought grimly, _I should have known,_ — when the phaser beams struck.

One blast wouldn’t be enough. _Nausicaans are extremely tough,_ Natasha categorized, instinctually. _Ridged faces protect against cranial damage, double-heart allows for redundancy in blood flow. They’re wearing body armour, I’ll need to target the eyes and throat to do critical damage._ A part of her, a _large_ part of her, wanted to kill them for daring to come here, to _her_ ship to attack _her_ crew. A more rational part of her remembered her training, though, both what she had absorbed in childhood and what she’d had in the Academy. _Alive,_ her training said. _Take them alive._

The rationales were different. Her early training wanted to torture them for information, her later said life was precious and shouldn’t be wasted. Both agreed that dead men were less useful than living men, and Natasha knew the pleasure she would gain from killing them was insignificant when weighed against the information they could reveal.

All of this crossed her mind in the time it took her to roll, dial up the power on her phasers with her thumbs, and come up on one knee to fire again. She struck one Nausicaan with both phasers in the centre of his chest. He grunted but collapsed, toppling forward onto the deck of the Bridge.

Beside her, Danielle took down the second Nausicaan. A third remained, but the Bridge crew had gathered their wits by then, and struck together. Lieutenant Morse had the command chair during gamma shift and was standing in the centre of the Bridge with her phaser pointed. Likewise, Lieutenant Mackenzie at Security was firing. Both of their beams struck the Nausicaan in the chest, with Ensign Campbell at Navigation firing a second later.

The Nausicaan tumbled. The Bridge crew looked around, confirming that the immediate threat had been dealt with. Natasha nodded at their efficiency — they’d have to drill more on this particular scenario, but for the gamma shift they’d done okay. “Report.”

“Computer is down, Captain, all systems are offline. We’ve dropped out of warp, and impulse drive isn’t functioning.” Lieutenant Morse looked grim. “We’re dead in the water.”

Lieutenant Mackenzie — known colloquially as ‘Mack,’ Natasha remembered — frowned. “There’s obviously a ship near enough to transport from, but I have no idea where. All sensors are malfunctioning.”

Lieutenant Campbell looked up from Navigation. “Anybody got a window?”

Natasha nodded. “We need to start recon.” She pushed the toe of her boot against the nearest Nausicaan. “These three will be unconscious for several hours — they won’t be able to tell us anything until they wake up. Secure them and get them ready for interrogation.”

Danielle had holstered her phaser and pulled an electro-restraint from the security box on the Bridge. “Security teams should be sweeping the ship — they know to collect information and report back. Team five should be here any...” She trailed off as a knocking sound came from the turbolift at the rear of the Bridge. _Knock - double knock - knock._ She grinned. “That’s them now.”

Mack stepped forward and helped pry open the doors. Two security officers in gold stepped through. Beyond them, Natasha could see that the hatch on the top of the turbolift had been opened. “Captain,” the blue-skinned Andorian woman said, nodding grimly to Natasha, “Nausicaans have been — ” She broke off when she noticed the three figures prostrate on the floor. “Oh.”

Natasha nodded. “Yes, we’ve learned of the intruders. Do you have any other information to report?”

The Vulcan man beside her stepped forward. “Yes, Captain. It appears, with seventy-six percent probability, that the intruders are making their way to Engineering.”

“Engineering?” Danielle repeated with a frown. She turned to Natasha. “Permission to engage a focused scan of the intruders, Captain?”

Natasha nodded. “Granted.”

Danielle nodded back, her eyes going unfocused. “Ten minds,” she said, senses obviously extending past the Bridge, sweeping through the ship. “Three unconscious here, seven more scattered on various decks. All Nausicaans.” She frowned. “Their purpose is singular, to do as they have been ordered so they can get paid. Credits, more than enough credits to justify the risk.” Her eyes were darting back and forth, her shoulders tense. “They want… they want to secure the ship; no — they want to _hold_ the ship, delay… delay our response. They — ” Her focus snapped to Natasha. “The dagger. They’re after the dagger.”

Natasha sucked in a breath. “The jevonite dagger from Lissepia?”

“Yes,” Danielle confirmed with a nod. “They’re heading to Engineering because they know that to hold the ship they need to command the computer and prevent us from re-engaging the engine core.” She frowned again, her eyes losing focus. “There _is_ a ship, off the port bow. Small, mobile — it knew we were coming. There’s someone onboard, someone…” She looked up. “It’s too far away for me to get much, but I think they’re human.”

“Okay,” Natasha said, nodding. “We know more than we did. Let’s form a strike team and get to Engineering. Morse,” she looked at the Lieutenant, “secure the Bridge. You, you, and you,” she pointed to Mack, the Andorian woman, and the Vulcan man, “come with us. Cage, take the lead — you’re our point woman. Permission granted to scan for all threats.”

“Yes, Captain,” Danielle saluted. She nodded to the various security officers, and then tossed Morse the electro-restraint. “There’s five more in the box.”

Morse caught the restraint with a nod. “We’ll get these three tied up and be ready if anyone else attacks.” She gestured and Campbell left Navigation to help her.

Natasha indicated the turbolift. “Chief, lead the way. Everyone,” she looked around, and met her crew’s eyes. “This is our ship, we’re taking it back. Let’s go.”

 

*

 

Clint and Phil met up with Security Team Seven when they reached the Armoury. The three crewmembers were already there, having incapacitated the two Nausicaans they’d found trying to break into the highly secure facility.

“Excellent job, Ensign, Lieutenant,” Phil said, nodding to the two-person team. “Status report.”

Lieutenant Triplett and Ensign Briggs both saluted, Tripp reporting smartly, “Commander Coulson, sir. Runners have confirmed the Bridge is secure, but computer control remains down. Captain Romanova believes the Nausicaans are pirates and working for credits — they have apparently come to secure Engineering and the jevonite dagger retrieved from Lissepia.”

Clint, keeping watch in the corridor, frowned. “Damn. Do we know how many are on board?”

Tripp shook his head. “Ten, but I’m not sure where they all are. Our job was to secure the Armoury.”

Phil looked at Clint. “In that case, we should make our way to Engineering. The dagger is there, and we won’t get control of the ship back until we can figure out what’s wrong with the computer.”

Clint looked torn — Phil suspected he wanted to make sure Captain Romanova was all right — but finally nodded. “You’re right; our first priority should be to wrestle back control of the ship.”

“Our latest information indicates that both the Captain and Chief Cage are on their way to the Engineering Deck,” Tripp said.

“Okay, we’ll meet them there,” Phil said, and turned his attention to the Armoury. It was kept on a completely separate system in case of just this eventuality, and Phil was able to manually unlock the door and disarm the security measures. “There. Lieutenant, guard this door and arm any crewmember who comes by.”

Tripp nodded. “Will do, sir.”

Phil and Clint both made their selections, and then set off again, this time heading to Engineering through a different set of Jefferies Tubes. They moved swiftly despite the need to crawl, Clint once again in the lead, and Phil found his adrenalin surging. It felt good to be working together against a common enemy, even better than it had on Lissepia, because now they were both armed, both dangerous. Clint seemed to share the feeling, because he glanced back before he triggered the hatch just before the final section that would lead them to Engineering. 

“We’re going to kick their asses, you know,” he said, his eyes bright.

“Yes, we are,” Phil agreed, before hauling Clint in for a quick, hard kiss. “Don’t get yourself killed, Hawkeye.”

“You neither, Starfleet.”

They both nodded, and then Clint turned and triggered the hatch. Moving slowly, barely making a sound, both men crawled the length of the last Jefferies Tube. Clint clutched his bow, managing to be silent even with a phaser strapped to either thigh. Phil did likewise with a phaser in each hand and a rifle slung across his back.

Reaching the end of the Jefferies Tube, Clint turned to Phil and handed him his bow as he triggered the hatch on the floor — carefully, silently, inching forward until he could lean down and stick his head out, glancing around Engineering.

Phil put his phasers down and held the bow, trying to keep his attention on the mission and not the enormous sign of trust Clint had just given him. He couldn’t resist sliding one reverent thumb across the riser, though. Clint never let _anyone_ touch his bow.

They were on the last subdeck above Engineering. Below them was the catwalk that surrounded the engine core, which was dark instead of pulsing its usual deep, purple-blue. The deck lighting was off, as it was across the ship, and only the dim red glow of the emergency lights illuminated the room far below.

Clint watched for a long minute, before carefully drawing his head back into the Jefferies Tube. Phil held his breath the entire time. He knew that Clint’s tousled blond hair would be hard to see among the shadows, but he also knew that it would only take one quick glance to trigger alarm.

“I can’t see the dagger. It’s either been moved or Harry had it in her office,” Clint reported, speaking in a voice so low Phil could barely hear him. “There are three Nausicaans: one at the computer and two standing guard.” His expression tightened. “I saw four Starfleet officers, all either unconscious, or dead.”

Phil pressed his lips together. “Harry?”

Clint shook his head. “Not that I could see. Besides, she’d have gone to her quarters after getting back from Lissepia.”

“Maybe,” Phil agreed, “but then again, it’s Harry, so she might have gone to check on her engines.” He sighed. “It doesn’t matter, anyways, there’s nothing we can do for them until we take care of the Nausicaans. What do you think they’re doing?”

“I’m not sure,” Clint said. “I couldn’t see the screen from this vantage point, but I know that it’s active. The Nausicaan was clearly using it. Every other monitor is dark, not even the red glow of stand-by.”

Phil nodded. “They must have used some sort of program to shut down the rest of the mainframe. Everything is being directed from that one point.”

Clint frowned. “But how? There would have been no way for them to beam aboard before shutting down the computer. They must have transported over and then somehow activated that monitor.”

Phil hated to consider this, but he had to. “Someone onboard might have helped them get in.”

“No.” Clint’s response seemed instinctive. He stopped, and took a deep breath. “Shit, you’re right. This’ll kill Natasha.”

Phil nodded. “All we can do now is take them down and question them later.”

Clint nodded. “I agree. We can sneak out of the Jefferies Tubes and make our way from the catwalk to the stairs that border the engine core.”

Phil shook his head. “You said one was on the computer — we’ll have to distract that Nausicaan before the fighting starts. That, or lure him away.”

“They can’t be that familiar with our systems,” Clint argued. “He’d need more than a second to do anything, and a second is all he’ll have.”

“They aren’t using our systems, they’ve wormed in with a sophisticated program,” Phil argued. “It might only take a second to trigger the self destruct.” 

Clint looked doubtful. “I suppose. Nausicaans aren’t usually the self-sacrificing type, though.”

“True,” Phil agreed, “and yet that last Nausicaan on Starbase G-6 turned his disruptor upon himself rather than be captured.”

“You’re right,” Clint admitted. “That was very strange.”

It was. The incident still bothered Phil, but he hadn’t been able to make sense of it, despite turning it over and over again in his mind. Phil shook his head and turned back to Clint. “I know you can take out the other two quickly, but before we can move, we need a distraction.”

“A distraction?” echoed another voice. Clint and Phil both turned to see a tall woman with short, messy hair crawling laboriously towards them. Despite Jefferies Tubes not having been designed for a person of her stature, Harry Dresden managed with enough grace to indicate years of practice. She reached them, pushed the hair away from her eyes, and grinned. “You don’t say.”

 

*

 

“I found the suction pads that’ll get the door open,” Simon said. “Finally. I thought you used to be organized.”

“I _am_ organized,” Baz snapped, looking up from his notes. With the computer down, he was horribly short of distractions, and re-reading old case files was better than dealing with Simon Snow. “The medical equipment is organized perfectly.”

“Yeah, but the repair equipment isn’t,” Simon groused. He reappeared from the storage closet he’d been rummaging in. “The only reason I managed to get in was because the door hadn’t fully closed; you’d left a chair blocking the entrance, and then it was piled high with I don’t even know what.”

Baz sniffed. “Like I have time to organize storage closets.”

“Oh, is that ‘the help’s’ job, then?” Simon snarked. He passed Baz’s line of sight walking back to the main doors. His blond hair was tousled, slightly dirty, and _far_ too unfairly attractive. 

“Yes, exactly,” Baz said, sarcasm dripping from every word. “Because I have _so many servants_ on board this ship to cater to my every whim.” He lifted his arms to either side. “So many!” 

Simon rolled his eyes and turned to the door, attaching one suction pad to the right side and one to the left. “You’re such a jerk.”

“And you’re an ass,” Baz said, reflexively. It was a familiar routine, a combination of insults perfected during their years as roommates back at Starfleet Academy. It came out wearier than he was used to, though. “Tell me,” he said, still tired — so _tired_ — of fighting with Simon, “is that why you’ve always hated me, because my family had servants we paid not only well, but handsomely?”

“No,” Simon grumbled, but paused in front of the doors, one hand on the right-sided suction pad. “I mean, yes.” He ran a hand through his hair. “Do you remember the first thing you ever said to me?”

Baz frowned. “‘Hello?’” He remembered Simon walking into their shared quarters, his open, inquisitive face hardening instantly the moment he’d seen Baz.

“No,” Simon said. He huffed a laugh and turned around, leaning back against the door to look at Baz. “We met the week before I moved into the Academy, during the campus tour. You asked me where the bathrooms were, and then snapped your fingers and demanded a glass of water instead.” He demonstrated, raising one hand. “‘Hey you, boy,’” he said, in a horrible imitation of Baz’s English accent. He lowered his hand, letting his head _thunk_ back against the door. “You made me feel like an idiot.”

Baz blinked. He didn’t remember that. “I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, well,” Simon hitched a shoulder, turning back to the doors, “it wasn’t the first time you made me feel like I wasn’t welcome at Starfleet Academy, like I was too stupid or too common, to be there. You and your family, the people you hung out with — you’d all been there for generations, you had pictures of Admirals up on the walls. I got in by the skin of my teeth, I _wanted_ to be there, and I felt like I had to fight every day to keep my place.”

“Simon…” Baz said. He shook his head. “You weren’t stupid, just the opposite — you were so goddamn smart, and so quick with things, I _hated_ it. I had this whole legacy to continue, sitting on me like a weight, and there you were, just prancing through subjects I needed, and I despised it.” He snorted. “Do you remember the day you aced your organic chemistry test?”

Simon looked over his shoulder with a frown on his face. “No?”

“Exactly,” Baz said. “You didn’t even _care._ It would have been better if you'd crowed about it, but no — you said, and I quote, ‘It’s not a big deal.’” Baz shook his head. “Like I didn’t have to retake it three times, a class I _needed_ to pass to get into Med School.”

Simon shrugged. “I’ve always like chem.”

“Exactly!” Baz exclaimed. “You did! You enjoyed all the sciences, and the arts, and that godawful humanities course we had to take, what was it? ‘The Art of the Conversation,’ or something.” He snorted. “And after all of that, you went into _Security._ What a waste.”

“Hey!” Simon protested. “I like Security!”

“It’s a tragedy,” Baz told him. “You could have done anything!”

Simon crossed his arms over his chest. “I like helping people,” he said stubbornly. “I like making them feel safe.”

Baz sighed. “I can’t believe you haven’t lost your youthful idealism.” It was ridiculous, and yet somehow even more enchanting than it had been, back in the day. 

“And _you_ haven’t lost your cynicism,” Simon huffed. “Honestly, Baz, you’re a _doctor._ Your job is all about helping people.”

“No, my job is to get them running again, like dirty, snotty, irritating machines that keep breaking down,” Baz groused. He hated it when people went on and on about the ‘noble calling of medicine.’ Being a doctor was a _job,_ just like any other profession. Baz felt more like an engineer, most days, and might honestly have considered it, if machines hadn’t been so foreign. “At least biology makes sense — blood flow, heart rate, physiological responses to stress. That’s stuff I understand.” He eyed Simon. “You? You, I don’t understand.”

Simon eyed him. “Is that why you kept trying to kill me?”

Baz threw up his hands. “For the last time! I never tried to kill you!”

“Injure, then.”

“ _No,_ I — ” Baz was forced to stop and reconsider. “Okay, _fine._ One time. _One time_ I tried to injure you.”

“Ah ha!” Simon exclaimed. He stabbed a finger in Baz’s direction. “I knew it! Which time?”

“The time you fell down the turbolift shaft,” Baz admitted. “Second year. Brian-down-the-hall had reprogrammed it to get Michel back for the stunt he’d pulled with the water balloon, and you were standing _right there,_ and I was, I don’t know, I was jealous, so I triggered it.”

Simon frowned. “The turbolift shaft? I don’t remember that.”

Baz rolled his eyes. “You nearly broke your leg. You remember, come on, you were going on a date with that guy, what was his name?” He snapped his fingers to try and remember. “Oh, right — Jeremy.”

Simon scrunched up his face. “Jeremy? Jeremy… oh! The one with the tattoo on his shoulder? That didn’t last long.”

“Yeah, well, it lasted longer than Mary,” Baz snorted, “or Jeannie, or John.” He realized he was getting into dangerous territory, and backed off. “Anyways, that was the only time, I promise.”

“Oh,” Simon said. He looked thoughtful. “Wait, what do you mean, you were jealous?”

“I think we should get this door open,” Baz said instead of answering the question. _Idiot._ He was such an idiot where Simon was concerned. “Don’t you?”

Simon shrugged and turned back to the door. “I guess so.” He raised both hands and gripped the suction pads, then tensed, as if he was going to physically pull them apart.

“Whoa!” Baz said, startled. “What are you doing?”

Simon raised an eyebrow. “I know it’s very complicated,” he groused, “incredibly difficult to understand, but — ”

“Ass,” Baz muttered, crossing the room and coming to stand beside Simon by the door. “I mean, what are you doing, pulling that way? You’re still healing. Need I remind you about the _giant gaping wound_ I recently repaired in your chest cavity?”

Simon rolled his eyes. “It’s fine,” he dismissed, and then eyed Baz, somewhat hesitantly. “You did a good job, I feel lots better.”

“I kept you alive, you mean,” Baz grumbled, “and just barely, at that. You’re going to have a horrible scar.”

Simon shrugged. “Security officers are supposed to have scars.” He flashed Baz a smile. “Makes us look intimidating.”

Baz snorted. “Get yourself punched in the face next time, then, instead of shot in the chest,” he said, clearing his throat when his words came out a little more tense than he’d wanted them to. “Anyways, here.” He grasped one of the pads. “Let me help.”

Simon eyed him. “Fine,” he said finally, moving both hands to the other pad. “On the count of three, okay? One, two, — ”

They pulled together. The door slid open, not smoothly, but easier than Baz would have expected. Simon let go and leaned forward, one hand already holding a phaser. He peered quickly back and forth in the hallway. “No one there,” he said, leaning back again. “I think we should keep the doors open a crack in case someone needs help, but otherwise leave them mostly closed, for now. Barton’s right — we don’t know what’s going on, and we should prepare for boarders.”

“Right,” Baz agreed, and together the two of the pushed the doors together again, close enough to provide some barrier, but not all the way closed. “There?”

“Looks good,” Simon declared, and stepped back again. “So, uh,” he said, clearly casting around for a topic, “what were you reading back there, before I interrupted you?”

“What?” Baz asked, following Simon’s gaze back to his desk. “Oh.” He shook his head. “Nothing, just rereading my report on Captain Block’s death. I already had it loaded on my padd, and with main power down, I can’t access any other files. I was going over the genetic analysis again. It still doesn’t make any sense.”

Simon looked interested. “Oh?”

Baz nodded. “There was no sign of disruptor energy in the sample of his remains. I would have expected at least half of it to be vaporized, or at least damaged, but it was perfect — a perfect match.”

Simon frowned. “That _is_ strange. What about micro-mutations since his last appointment?”

Baz hid a smile. _This_ was why he found himself so in danger when it came to Simon; the man was remarkably intelligent, with such a variety of interests, that it always made conversation between them interesting. “None, but then again, that wasn’t so unusual — it’d only been a week since his last appointment. He’d specifically requested one.”

Simon blinked. “Block?”

“Yes,” Baz said with a shrug. “He said it was in preparation for retirement — we joked about it.”

“Of course, all chummy-chummy with the captain, just because he was a friend of your Mum’s,” Simon said.

“Hey,” Baz said, his tone sharp. “Block and my mother were not _friends._ They knew each other, and served on a few councils together, but that was all.”

Simon eyed him. “You can’t deny that Block was old-world Starfleet, Baz, and you are, too.”

Baz pressed his lips together. “I’m not denying anything,” he said, because he _wasn’t._ His mother hadn’t liked Block, though, he remembered her saying so. Block might have come from a good family, and he’d absorbed most of those values that his mother admired, but he’d been an unimaginative idiot, and she’d always hated those. “It doesn’t matter, anyways, they’re both dead, after all.”

Simon paused. “You’re right,” he said finally. “I’m sorry.”

Baz shook his head. “It’s fine.” Except it wasn’t. He’d loved his mother, despite her flaws, and her death still hurt. “If we’re forced to stay here and be ready for casualties, we’ll need to find something to occupy us that won’t lead to difficult conversations or property damage.” He cast around, drumming his fingers on his thigh as he found nothing in sight to distract them from each other’s company, at least until he looked at his desk. Baz brightened. “Cards?”

Simon let out a laugh, and his shoulders, which had gone tight, came down. “You mean you still carry a pack around?” 

“Of course,” Baz said, going to his desk and pulling out the worn deck. “Rummy or gin?”

Simon eyed him. “I thought you said no property damage? I remember the last time we played gin.”

“Fine, then,” Baz said, “cribbage. I don’t have a board, but we can use hyposprays.”

Simon smiled. “Okay, fine,” he said, pulling up the visitor’s chair in front of Baz’s desk. “But I’m dealing.”

 

*

 

“You said we need a distraction,” Harry repeated, reaching into the pocket of her black duster. “I have just the thing.”

Clint eyed her skeptically. Harry’s idea of a ‘distraction’ could be anything from a flock of geese to a large explosion. “What is it?” 

“This,” she said, pulling an oblong device from her pocket. “It’s a paralytic agent, near-lethal to humans, but strong enough to knock a Nausicaan out. Just throw it into a corner, wait until one of them goes to check it out, and then detonate.” She made a ‘popping’ motion with her fingers. “They’ll be out for at least an hour.”

Clint found himself nodding. “Sounds good, do you think it could take out all three of them at once?”

“Wait,” Phil interrupted. “What do you mean, ‘near-lethal?’”

Harry shrugged. “It’ll almost kill you but won’t?”

Clint, who’d been reaching out to take the device, paused. 

“Is it liquid, energy-based, or aerosolized?” Phil asked. Clint could now happily admit to himself that he found Phil taking charge of a situation hot.

“Aerosolized,” Harry admitted. “Small cloud, green smoke, takes about an hour to dissipate.”

Phil shook his head. “That’s too long. We need to be able to get into the engine room and reverse whatever they’ve done to the computer.”

“I’ve got a gas mask,” Harry protested, pulling one from another of her voluminous pockets.

“What about Clint, and me?” Phil argued. Clint ignored the way his first name coming from Phil’s mouth gave him a thrill. “You’ll need someone to watch your back while you investigate, and what if someone else walks in? No, it’s too risky.”

“Fine, then,” Harry groused, putting both the device and the gas mask away, “what do you suggest?”

“Clint can take two Nausicaans at once,” Phil said. His confidence was offhand, like a statement of fact. “I can take one.” He lifted the phaser rifle they’d taken from the armoury. “The concern we have is the computer — we need to distract them before we attack, so they don’t have time to make any changes on the computer.”

“Right,” Harry said. She indicated the hatch. “Can I have a look?”

Phil nodded, and they both moved aside. Harry squirmed forward as best she was able and poked her head out the Jefferies Tube. Clint and Phil waited, tense, pressed together against the side of the Tube. Harry wasn’t a wide woman, but she was tall, and she took up more than her fair share of the cramped space. 

“You’re right, three Nausicaans,” Harry called up softly. “Two are by the computer now, I can’t see what they’re doing, they’re grunting, and — ” She stopped. “Hold on,” she said, her tone changing, “something’s going on.”

“What?” Clint asked. Harry scooted back and he and Phil crept forward. They poked their heads out together and looked towards where the Nausicaans were standing on the Engineering Deck. 

Sure enough, something had changed. The one Nausicaan was frowning, looking confused, and poking at the computer. A second was looking over his shoulder, grunting, and a third was casting around wildly. “What…?”

All of a sudden, the lights in Engineering flickered. Not the red emergency lights, but the real ones. They lit for a moment, died, and then lit again. The computer screens also flared momentarily to life before flickering and dying.

Clint didn’t know what was going on, but he knew an opportunity when he saw one. The Nausicaans were standing back from the main terminal now, looking around, and Clint glanced over and saw Phil was watching him, ready. He nodded, and the two of them moved together — Clint going first, letting go of his handholds on the Jefferies Tube, sliding forward, rolling once he hit the catwalk, keeping his motions smooth, reducing the amount of noise.

His bow was in his hands and he had two arrows nocked and ready on the string by the time Phil joined him, near-silent in the gloom of the catwalk, phaser rifle ready and primed in his hands. 

Without another word between them, they shot together, Clint’s two arrows and Phil’s single phaser bolt. The three Nausicaans stumbled back, looking surprised before they fell, none of them close enough to reach the computer for any last-minute commands.

Clint and Phil took off, racing for the Engineering Deck. They each took one of the staircases that boarded the catwalk and ran swiftly, circling Engineering and alert for the presence of surprises or threats. They found none and converged on the main floor, carefully striding forward and confirming that the Nausicaans were down for the count, two with arrows through their eyes and one with a hole through his throat. Difficult shots, all of them, and clearly lethal, but Clint felt nothing but satisfaction and more than a little pride. 

He hadn’t asked for this fight, and neither had Phil, but they had each been ready to respond. At another time, Phil might have argued against the loss of life, but not when the safety of their ship and crew were on the line. Sure enough, a glance towards him showed Phil looking only tense, prodding the nearest Nausicaan with his toe and stepping over him when it was clear he wasn’t going anywhere.

Clint walked over to the computer. A screen was flashing, but he had no idea what that meant. “Harry?”

“I’m coming,” she called, and he looked up to see her scrambling down from the catwalk. 

Phil was looking around. “What was that, before? When the lights flashed?”

Clint shook his head. “I’m not sure, I — ” He stopped when a side-door slid open and Rodney McKay came tumbling out. 

“Did it work?” Rodney said, looking around. His thin, wispy hair was in disarray, like he’d been running his hands through it, and there was grease on his science-blue uniform. He must have caught sight of the Nausicaans, because he pumped a hand into the air. “Ha!”

“Rodney!” someone snapped, and Clint looked up to see John Sheppard dangling down from the ceiling. He’d obviously been there providing sniper support, a decent location, though the catwalk had been better. “I told you to wait until the area was secure.”

“It’s secure, look, everyone is dead,” Rodney said, shrugging before making his way to the computer. He started tapping on the screen. “Oh baby, poor thing, what did they _do_ to you?”

Harry hurried over and joined him. Rodney moved over without having to be asked, giving her half the controls. “What did they — ? Oh, they used the emergency bypass controls? Those jerks!”

“I know!” Rodney exclaimed. He tapped a control. “See here, though? We can — ”

“Yes, yes, but if we — ”

“I know, but — ”

Clint ignored the scientists and turned to Sheppard. “Hey. You got him to Engineering, good job. Run into any trouble on the way?”

Sheppard shook his head. “We saw some Nausicaans, but managed to avoid them.” He looked embarrassed. “McKay did all the work, I was just there to keep an eye out.”

“You did well,” Phil said, coming up beside them. “Thank you. Now I suggest we search the engine room for stray boarders and then each cover an entry point. We know that wasn’t the last of them.”

“Good idea,” Sheppard said. He stepped towards the left bulkhead. There was a turbolift there, as well as a door. He got out a set of suction pads and applied one to each side of the door, sliding them apart to glance through it. “Do we know how many beamed over?”

Phil shook his head, taking another door on his right and repeating the process. “No. Runners from the Bridge confirm that area is secure, and we think Captain Romanova is on her way here.”

Clint moved to the rear while Phil was talking, eyeing the three doors there. He was pretty sure one led to Harry’s office, one to a turbolift, and the other one was maybe a closet. 

“So what is this all about?” Sheppard asked. “Why are they here?”

Phil explained about the dagger, and Rodney hissed. “I _knew_ it.”

Clint cocked his head. “Why?”

Rodney glanced up from the computer long enough to stare at him. “Um, well, you see — ”

He was cut off by a sound coming from one of the turbolift stations. Clint abandoned the door he’d been investigating and advanced, raising his weapon along with everyone else. 

“Friendlies!” a voice called out, from behind the door. There was a hissing sound, and then the turbolift doors slid open, revealing Security Chief Cage and a group behind her. “We’re friendlies.”

“Natasha!” Clint said, lowering his bow and hurrying forward. She was there, standing behind Cage, a phaser in each hand and a focused look on her face. She looked lithe and deadly, like the days of old. “It’s good to see you. Not that I was worried, of course.”

“You better not have been,” Natasha said. She holstered one phaser and stepped forward. “McKay, Sheppard, Dresden.” She nodded to each of them before turning to her Number One. “Coulson, report.”

Phil straightened. “Mr. Barton and I made our way here to Engineering after encountering one of the Security Teams. We found three Nausicaans, one obviously working on the computer. With the timely assistance of Wizard Dresden, Lieutenant Commander McKay, and Lieutenant Sheppard, we managed to down the three aggressors. Dresden and McKay were just attempting to determine what has been done to the computer, and how it might be fixed.”

“Well done, everyone,” Natasha said. “Dresden, McKay, any ideas?”

Harry scowled. “We’re not sure yet, everything is a _mess._ ”

“Do you know how they got in?” Phil asked.

McKay gestured to the screen. “They somehow infiltrated the computer using the backup protocols designed to be last-ditch approaches to wrangle unwieldy security systems doing regular maintenance routines. I don’t know how they got in, because this stuff is buried under _layers_ of security, but once they were in, it was easy. The protocols are designed to function when all computer systems are offline, so they backtracked from there and used a worm to corrupt the system.”

Natasha’s lips flattened. “I was watching from my ready room when the infiltration started. I tried to lock the computer down, but was unsuccessful.” She hesitated. “The program looked complete, like it only required authorization to proceed. The computer called it ‘Operation London Bridge.’”

Clint blinked. “What?” He was remembering something, something faint, a song he’d heard before his fateful operation on Betazed to steal the Sacred Chalice of Rixx. The person who’d given him the job, who’d he thought had been Los, his usual contact, had said something, and Clint had found himself with that song stuck in his brain for _days._ “London Bridge is — ”

“Falling down,” a familiar voice finished. 

Clint turned to see a man stepping out from one of the doors he hadn’t searched, the one he thought was Harry’s office. He was an older man, with salt-and-pepper hair, a slightly round face and eyes that were hard instead of kind. It took Clint a moment to place him, because he’d only seen him once, and he was supposed to be dead. “Captain Block.”

Block grinned. “Hello, everyone,” he said. “Surprise.”

 

~ The End of Episode Four


End file.
